Iraq to take legal custody of Saddam

[seemslikeadream]

Agencies
Tuesday June 29, 2004

Saddam Hussein and up to 11 other "high value" detainees will tomorrow be transferred from US to Iraqi legal custody, Ayad Allawi, the new prime minister of Iraq, announced today.
Speaking 24 hours after his interim government had been granted control of the country, Mr Allawi told his first news conference that he had requested custody of the "most notorious and high profile" detainees held by the US in prison camps around Iraq.

Saddam will appear before an Iraqi judge on Thursday in an initial hearing, at which he will face charges, including genocide, related to his 23 years of rule. However, he will remain in a US-run jail because the Iraqi government lacks high security detention facilities.

Mr Allawi said it was likely to be "a number of months" before the full trial of the former dictator took place, and urged the Iraqi people to be patient.

He said: "I know I speak for my fellow countrymen when I say I look forward to the day former regime leaders face justice.

more
http://www.guardian.co.uk/turkey/story/0,12700,1249930,00.html

[LittleApple81]

1. Isn't it Chalabi's son who is going to be the judge? The mess will

continue. As long as Saddam cannot talk, they will be happy.

[CWebster]

2. And Ayad Allawi has his own little personal Baathist vendetta. nt

[seemslikeadream]

4. PM Allawi strikes note of alarm as new Iraqi government sworn in

PM Allawi strikes note of alarm as new Iraqi government sworn in

Interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi delivers a speech during the swearing-in ceremony in Baghdad

"I call on all the heroes of the past ... all the sons of Iraq to make every effort to eradicate the foreign terrorists who are killing our people and destroying our country," Allawi said at the ceremony following the official handover of sovereignty by the US-led coalition occupying Iraq.


"Before us there is a challenge and a burden and we ask God almighty to give us patience," Yawar told the ceremony on the stage, bedecked with Iraqi flags.

Quoting from the Koran, he also called for Iraq to work "in the spirit of a family protecting our country and take away our old wounds and overcome our
grievances".



While Yawar, dressed in tribal robes, promised reconciliation, a grim Allawi sketched the tough road ahead to his people, aware insurgents were trying to discredit his government set to skipper Iraq until January elections.

Allawi warned members of Saddam's former Baath party to shun the insurgency.


Allawi, himself a former Baathist, advocated expanding the army after the US-led coalition disbanded the old 400,000 strong military last year and fuelled the discontent of Sunni Muslims associated with the old regime.


"In adidition to that our production of oil is regressing ...because of the terrorists and their targeting of power and oil facilities," Allawi said. "So it will take time, maybe a year or two, before we build a strong and healthy economy."

He also paid tribute to the country's religious leaders and publicly saluted the spiritual leader of Iraq's Shiite majority, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, who opposed the US-led coalition's delays on holding elections. - AFP

more
http://www.channelnewsasia.com/stories/afp_world/view/92611/1/.html

Published on Sunday, June 27, 2004 by The Sunday Herald (Scotland)
June 30th: Bogus End To A Bogus War
Terror Warnings: The Allies will hand over sovereignty to Iraq this week, but resistance leaders have vowed to unleash yet more violence

by Neil Mackay

JUST seconds before he decapitated the US hostage Nick Berg, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi addressed these words to "the mothers and wives of American soldiers": "You will see nothing from us except corpse after corpse and casket after casket of those slaughtered in this fashion."

Zarqawi and his two lieutenants, who filmed the whole gruesome execution, then fell on Berg, literally sawing off his head. The video was made for one purpose: propaganda. And the message was quite clear: the Americans, their allies or those Iraqis who "collaborated" with the occupying forces were all targets and they would die in the most dreadful fashion possible.

This month, Zarqawi - an al-Qaeda affiliate and the most prominent Islamic fundamentalist terrorist in Iraq - and other disparate groups including Saddam loyalists and the Shia followers of the radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr have made many more Bergs.

On Thursday, more than 100 people were killed in rebel attacks in five cities. On June 17, 41 died in a car bombing. June 16 saw the killing of the security chief of the Iraqi oil fields in Kirkuk. On June 14, 12 died in a car bombing in Baghdad. On June 12 and 13 two assassinations claimed the lives of an education ministry official and the interim deputy foreign minister. And on June 8, 15 died in car bombings in Mosul and Baquba. These are by no means all the killings - just selected atrocities in the daily horror of life in occupied Iraq.

Such overwhelming violence has made the official handover of sovereignty from the occupying powers to Iraq on Wednesday a paper exercise . In theory, Iraq will regain its sovereignty, but in practice nothing will have changed. Zarqawi and his followers will still be killing Iraqi "fifth columnists" and foreign troops, US and British soldiers will still be controlling the day-to-day lives of ordinary people.
more
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0627-02.htm


Iraqi PM Prepares to Face Down Guerrillas

Posted on Mon, Jun. 28, 2004
JIM KRANE

Associated Press

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Bomb-building Islamic radicals have joined forces with guerrilla foot soldiers from Saddam Hussein's ousted regime in a bloody insurgency that now has a new target: Iraq's fragile day-old government.

Officials have been warning that insurgents were planning a bloody offensive and a spate of car bombs to disrupt the day that the interim government is installed.

more
http://www.tallahassee.com/mld/tallahassee/news/9034452.htm

An inside look at the first few hours

By HANNAH ALLAM

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Within five hours of returning sovereignty to a new interim Iraq regime, the only Americans left in the marble-floored nerve center of Iraq's new government on Monday were the private security guards standing outside Prime Minister Iyad Allawi's office - and one U.S. reporter.

The rest had gone, bidding their Iraqi counterparts goodbye and good luck in the building whose hallways until now had been crowded with American advisers to the now-disbanded Iraqi Governing Council.

In one way, the sudden handover of power, two days ahead of schedule, was symbolic - the Iraqis were called on to react to the American timetable. Few, if any, had been warned of what was about to happen, and the building, once a guesthouse at Saddam Hussein's palace, had an air of chaos as aides scrambled to make deadlines they found out about only when they woke that morning.


But by the end of the day, it was clear that whatever the coming days would show in the rest of Iraq, that Iraqis were in charge of the government center.

President Ghazi al-Yawar, in his trademark flowing robes and Arab headdress, strode through the building with a regal air unseen in 15 months of American occupation.
more
http://www.fortwayne.com/mld/newssentinel/9033955.htm


Al-Zarqawi Says Iraq’s PM Allawi Marked For Assassination

Today’s car-bombers ought to think over a lesson their new Prime Minister learned the hard way: You can’t just take over a country by blowing up random humans. You’ve got to work hard your whole life, and maybe, someday, if you play your cards right and take just enough money from just the right people, you can take over the job of pretending to rule a country full of people that want to kill you.


It seems that being the first Prime Minister of Iraq’s new Democratic Era could be a tough job. On the one hand, there’s the 160,000 heavily armed foreign soldiers in the country who won’t be leaving until things calm down and someone starts to make some serious money out of this whole disaster. On the other, twenty-five million people live in the country, and at best they think that Iyad Allawi is a corrupt puppet (Marketplace quoted wealthy businessmen who nominated him ‘most likely to sell his influence for money.’) At the less favorable end, they are holding rocket launchers and AK-47s and are actively working to throw the foreign fighters and the new PM’s entire entourage (popularly known as ‘the imported government’) out.

In reality though, Allawi’s main jobs will be to keep himself alive, follow orders, and be a good spokesperson. Iraq will be controlled as much as is possible by Americans, partly by the military who will continue with their brutal occupation, and now also from the largest US Embassy in the world.

Hours after Paul Bremer fled Baghdad, his true successor arrived. John Negroponte is the perfect man for the job. His last post was ambassador to the UN, where he smoothly yet unsuccessfully tried to sell the Iraq war. But his best experience for the position was earned as ambassador to Honduras, at that time under a military dictatorship, where he was alleged to be a central figure in the support of the Contras in Nicaragua and of ‘Battalion 316’, the CIA-trained military intelligence group that carried out torture, kidnappings and murders in Honduras.

more
http://www.infoshop.org/inews/stories.php?story=04/06/28/1703792

Showtime in Iraq



The story line for the unexpected U.S. transfer of sovereignty to Iraqis on Monday unfolded less like the plot of a razzmatazz Hollywood blockbuster than of a rich-with-meaning independent film.
The stealth event — a far cry from the pomp and ceremony planned for Wednesday — underscored the myriad vulnerabilities the new government and its U.S. protectors face. When is the symbolic birth of a new nation hidden rather than celebrated?

But it, nevertheless, was the best way for new Prime Minister Iyad Allawi to secure a honeymoon. Insurgents were prevented from upstaging the handover of power and undercutting Allawi's authority from the get-go. His message, not theirs, set the tone for the battle for legitimacy, which is the key to determining which direction Iraq heads.

It provided, too, a moment for the world to pause. No matter whether you agree or disagree with the Iraq war, the fact that an Iraqi leader and his government are now in charge represents a new starting point after decades of brutalizing dictatorship. "This is a historic day, a happy day, a day that all Iraqis have been looking forward to," Allawi said.

What the new starting point leads to is, of course, far from certain. The most realistic U.S. hope is for a system to emerge that is stable enough to prevent the country from descending into civil war and becoming a terrorist haven. That almost certainly means accepting something partly Islamic in character and well short of Western democracy

more
http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/editorials/2004-06-28-edtwo_x.htm

Allawi Hints Martial Law May Soon Be In Order
Allawi said during the ceremony, "The security situation of our country now lies in our hands. We are going to announce the new measures today and tomorrow." Over the weekend Allawi also announced the U.S. would soon handover Saddam Hussein to the new Iraqi government.

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/06/28/1455202

Iyad Allawi must keep distance from US

MAN AT THE HELM: Allawi to whom US has handed power


Gwynne Dyer

AROUND THE WORLD

THE last thing Iyad Allawi needs right now is a photo-op of President George W. Bush congratulating him on becoming prime minister of the ‘sovereign’ (but US-appointed) government of Iraq.

What he must do in order to survive, not only politically but personally, is to put as much space as possible between himself and the United States, so if security concerns force Mr Bush’s handlers to cancel his long-scheduled secret trip to Baghdad on 30 June to do the ‘hand-over of power’ in person, it will be all right with Allawi.

Every Iraqi knows what happened to Nuri Said, fourteen times prime minister and London’s main instrument for controlling the British-appointed kings who ruled Iraq until 1958. When Iraqi nationalists rebelled and overthrew the puppet monarchy, they machine-gunned the young king, who was just playing the role he had been born into.

But when a mob caught Nuri Said two days later, trying to escape Baghdad dressed as a woman, they tore him apart with their bare hands and left his remains in the road to be flattened by the traffic like road-kill. Iraqis do not like collaborators.
The risk of ending up the same way must haunt Iyad Allawi, for his position is quite similar.

more
http://www.newvision.co.ug/D/8/20/368990

[tlcandie]

5. So, Negroponte is in and Bremer out, eh?

I go back to what I stated before from the leading Islamic spiritual guy out of Nahjef(?), that the new leader would be killed before the US for all to see if he was selected/elected/put in by the US within 5 years max.

If the US is touting martial law, maybe it will take longer. We will see.

I wish the Iraqi people peace, prosperity, and hope!

[seemslikeadream]

6. Bush's Terrorist: John Negroponte Sent to Iraq

Dems Ignore Negroponte's Death Squad Past, Look to Confirm Iraq Appointment

As Negroponte, responded to Hagel, he was interrupted by an activist, Andres Conteris of Non-violence International.

Andres Conteris, is program director for Latin America and the Caribbean for the human rights group Non-violence International. He disrupted yesterday's Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on John Negroponte's appointment as US ambassador to Iraq.

As ambassador to Honduras, Negroponte played a key role in coordinating US covert aid to the Contra death squads in Nicaragua and shoring up a CIA-backed death squad in Honduras. During his term as ambassador there, diplomats alleged that the embassy's annual human rights reports made Honduras sound more like Norway than Argentina. In a 1995 series, the Baltimore Sun detailed the activities of a secret CIA-trained Honduran army unit, Battalion 3-16, that used "shock and suffocation devices in interrogations. Prisoners often were kept naked and, when no longer useful, killed and buried in unmarked graves." In 1994, Honduras's National Commission for the Protection of Human Rights reported that it was officially admitted that 179 civilians were still missing.

A former official who served under Negroponte says he was ordered to remove all mention of torture and executions from the draft of his 1982 report on the human rights situation in Honduras. During Negroponte's tenure, US military aid to Honduras skyrocketed from $3.9 million to over $77 million. Much of this went to ensure the Honduran army's loyalty in the battle against popular movements throughout Central America.

http://www.pacifica.org/programs/dn/040428.html

Bush's Terrorist: John Negroponte Sent to Iraq
Negroponte's "embassy" in Baghdad will, according to press reports, constitute the largest US "embassy staff" in the world with some 3000 employees, including up to 1,000 Americans.

Yet according to a four-part series in the Baltimore Sun in 1995, in 1982 alone the Honduran press ran 318 stories of murders and kidnappings by the Honduran military.

Opponents of Negroponte are demanding that all Senators read the full report before voting on his nomination.http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/ROF111A.html
In a cruel irony, the Bush administration has appointed a bona fide "terrorist" to wage its "war on terrorism" in Iraq.


It should come as no surprise that "on the day he was appointed to Iraq, Honduras decided to bring its troops in Iraq home." (Financial Times, April 21, 2004)

http://www.conspiracyplanet.com/channel.cfm?channelid=2&contentid=1189

Face-off: Bush's Foreign Policy Warriors

On August 27, 1997, CIA Inspector General Frederick P. Hitz released a 211-page classified report entitled "Selected Issues Relating to CIA Activities in Honduras in the 1980's." This report was partly declassified on Oct. 22, 1998, in response to demands by the Honduran human rights ombudsman. Opponents of Negroponte are demanding that all Senators read the full report before voting on his nomination.

Reich, unlike Negroponte, is primarily a lobbyist and anti-Castro activist rather than a diplomat. He is director of the Washington-based Center for a Free Cuba and works for some of America's favorite industries: liquor (Bacardi), tobacco (British-American Tobacco), and weapons (Lockheed Martin). He also serves as vice-chairman of the Worldwide Responsible Apparel Program, or WRAP, an apparel industry-backed group characterized by union activists as an artifice for clothing importers to avoid serious scrutiny of their factories in developing countries.

In the 1980s, he headed a propaganda department in the State Department called the Office of Public Diplomacy. This unit, staffed with CIA and Pentagon psychological warfare specialists, reported to Oliver North. The function of the operation was to win support for administration policy in Central America. They wrote op-eds under the name of Nicaraguan rebel leaders and attacked those who differed with Reagan's policies. The Congressional investigation of the Iran-contra scandal identified numerous illegalities which led to the closure of the Office of Public Diplomacy.

Reich followed up these activities by serving as ambassador to Venezuela from 1986-89, at the height of the Iran-contra scandal. The Venezuelan government tried unsuccessfully to block his nomination.

While working for Bacardi, he successfully lobbied to slip Section 211 into the 1998 Omnibus Appropriations Bill, thus stripping Cuba of trademark protection. Ironically, he will be overseeing the Helms-Burton Act, which he helped to draft, which the administration has just decided not to carry into effect.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/ROF111A.html


NEGROPONTE - Sleeping Ambassador or Death Squad Diplomat?

The widespread use of American aerial surveillance to direct the Contra murderers to villages where only women and children were present to be killed, the routine use of torture, the encouragement of drug-smuggling into the U.S. to provide funding for the U.S.-backed forces all were revealed only after Negroponte had left his post as U.S. Ambassador to the Honduras. And who could forget the Honduran Anti-communist Liberation Army's ever popular practice of dropping victims from helicopters while they were in flight?

Make no mistake about it -- both Iraqi rebels and Al Qaeda terrorists see Negroponte's appointment as the first stage in implementing a policy of covert violence against their right to sovereignty and will effectively use it to recruit and incite radicals to commit more acts of violence against us. It's no coincidence that our Office of Homeland Security issued a heightened security alert just as Bush announced his plans for Negroponte.

http://www.buzzflash.com/contributors/04/04/con04178.html

US Martyrs Pose Questions for Negroponte
October 28, 2003
By TONI SOLO

US nuns murdered in El Salvador 4

In 1981, a couple of decades before Rachel Corrie was murdered, the bodies of four women were found in a shallow grave in a rural district not far from San Salvador, El Salvador's capital. They had been raped and shot dead by members of the Salvadoran army on the orders of senior officers. In the context of the time, the atrocity would hardly have merited reporting. But the women were United States citizens. Two were religious sisters of the New York based Maryknoll order, Ita Ford and Maureen Clarke. One was an Ursuline Sister, Dorothy Kazel, the fourth a lay missioner, Jean Donovan. By virtue of their nationality, the story did make the news, just--the back page of the New York Times, to that paper's eternal shame.

Those four women had helped defend Salvadorans from the terror unleashed against their own people by the Salvadoran government with support from the United States administrations of Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. They gave their lives working alongside vulnerable people and communities in El Salvador. The murders followed the assassination in 1980 of Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero. The women's deaths were manipulated by the US government and its ever-pliant news media. The full facts took years to emerge. US ambassador to the UN, Jean Kirkpatrick, falsely accused the women of having supported the Salvadoran armed opposition, the FMLN. In fact, the four women were passionate advocates of non-violence, accompanying the rural villagers they served while caught up in a violent civil war.

Ambassador Kirkpatrick's statements on the case of the four women were to be expected from an unrepentant supporter of the bloodthirsty Argentinian military dictatorship. Her successor at the UN was Vernon Walters, former deputy director of the CIA, co-organiser of the continent wide terrorist blueprint Plan Condor and promoter of Ronald Reagan's terrorist war against Nicaragua. In 1986 Vernon Walters threw in the face of the UN his government's rejection of the International Court of Justice verdict convicting the US of terrorism against Nicaragua.

Kirkpatrick's and Walters' apologetics for mass murder helped John Negroponte, then US ambassador to Honduras, cover up his support for the systematic forced disappearances used to destroy Honduran civilian opposition to the presence of Contra bases in their country. Thomas Pickering, US ambassador to El Salvador at the time, also gave misleading information on local army and paramilitary murders, probably an essential qualification for his subsequent posting in 1989 as US ambassador to the UN, taking over from Vernon Walters.

Jean Kirkpatrick, Vernon Walters, Thomas Pickering, John Negroponte and other US government representatives sent clear signals that the local military in El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala were to be allowed a free hand by the United States government to murder tens of thousands of civilians and anyone who spoke out against the slaughter. Perhaps the defining climax to the sickening murder campaign came in 1989 when the Salvadoran army killed six Jesuit academics and two of their domestic staff at the University of Central America in San Salvador. These crimes were made possible because the United States government consistently tried to conceal its institutional role in funding, training and supporting the military and paramilitary perpetrators. The Iran-Contra scandal was the culmination of that sustained program of regional deceit.


http://www.counterpunch.org/solo10282003.html

[papau]

9. Allawi requested and will get 12 other Baathist prisoners transferred to

his Courts/authority on June 30.

[kentuck]

3. What does legal custody mean in a country with no legal custody....

except the discretion and power of American soldiers?

[RUMMYisFROSTED]

7. Just like the handover.

Sovereignty without sovereignty.

And a Saddam transfer without an actual transfer.

Language is being rendered meaningless.

[Jack Rabbit]

8. Symbolic

In an act that is symbolic of Iraq's new sovereignty, the custody of Saddam will be symbolically given to Iraq while, in fact, he will remain in US custody.

[Timefortruth]

10. This is likely because he'd be allowed an American lawyer

if the US maintained "legal custody" based on yesterday's SCOUS ruling.

It is just more smoke and mirrors.

[Jack Rabbit]

12. I believe he has one

Even Satan is entitled to defense.

For that matter, even Bush will be entitled to a defense when the time comes.

[Timefortruth]

11. This is likely because he'd be allowed an American lawyer

if the US maintained "legal custody" based on yesterday's SCOUS ruling.

It is just more smoke and mirrors.